In June 1968, an election year, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced that he’d be retiring from the Supreme Court, and President Lyndon Johnson moved to elevate Associate Justice Abe Fortas, a longtime friend and ally, to the top spot. But a coalition of conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats blocked Fortas’ rise. He remained associate justice, and a new chief justice wasn’t appointed until President Richard Nixon took office the following year.

In the wake of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, many in the media have seized on the Fortas case—claiming that it’s clear precedent for a hostileCongress to thwart the Supreme Court nominee President Barack Obama will pick sometime over the next few weeks. Republicans—including many presidential candidates—claim they won’t support Obama’s choice because a president in his last year should leave the nominating to his successor. “The next election needs to be a referendum on the Court,” said Sen. Ted Cruz.

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But if Republicans are looking to 1968 for a precedent in this case, they might want to think twice. Sure, there are certainly parallels, but a deeper look at the Fortas story suggests that it might not be a precedent Republicans would want to revisit. First of all, the conservatives who opposed Fortas’ elevation to chief justice understood very well that LBJ had every a right to put forward a nomination in his last year in office. In fact the Senate held swift confirmation hearings for Fortas. In 1968, LBJ’s opponents were animated not so much by constitutional concerns as by politics—and race. Opposition to Fortas flowed directly from his liberalism and support for civil rights, and indirectly from his Judaism. It turns out Fortas was a deeply flawed nominee for other reasons, but historians remember the circumstances by which he was blocked for exactly what they were—reasons that were, for the most part, far from honorable.

And then there’s another thing for the GOP to consider: In blocking Abe Fortas, conservatives might have derived immediate satisfaction. But liberals made them pay for it in due time.

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Abe Fortas and Lyndon Johnson first met in 1938, when both were ambitious, young New Dealers. As LBJ rose to prominence as Senate majority leader and, later, as vice president, Fortas served as an informal legal and political adviser. That relationship only intensified after Johnson moved into the Oval Office. When LBJ’s longtime chief of staff, Walter Jenkins, was arrested on charges of lewd behavior weeks before the 1964 election, the president turned to Fortas and Clark Clifford, another D.C. fixer of long standing, to try to squash the story, as well as the charges. (It didn’t work.) Fortas edited major presidential addresses and provided counsel on the formation of Great Society legislation. He enjoyed unfettered access to Johnson and, along with Clifford and Jim Rowe, comprised the core of the president’s kitchen cabinet.

Even as he built a lucrative practice representing clients in the private sector, Fortas remained a committed advocate of liberal reform. In 1963 he provided pro bono representation to Clarence Gideon, a Florida man who had been convicted of a pool hall burglary two years earlier. Appearing before the U.S. Supreme Court, Fortas argued that Gideon—who had been too poor to afford a lawyer at his original trial—had been denied due process rights. The resulting opinion in Gideon v. Wainwright established the fundamental right to counsel.

LBJ tried on several occasions to convince his friend to accept a cabinet appointment, but Fortas was averse to abandoning his law practice during peak earning years, and his wife, Carol Agger—a prominent tax attorney in her own right—was obdurately opposed to the idea.

Applying the famous “Johnson Treatment,” in 1965 LBJ finally coaxed his friend into accepting an appointment as associate justice of the Supreme Court, where he filled the so-called “Jewish seat” previously held in backwards succession by Arthur Goldberg, Felix Frankfurter and Benjamin Cardozo. Over the next two and a half years, Fortas contributed to building on the Warren Court’s sizable legacy of liberal jurisprudence, including rulings on civil rights, privacy rights and the rights of the accused that infuriated conservatives of both parties who were already unnerved by LBJ’s expansion of the federal welfare state and desegregation of Southern schools, hospitals and places of public accommodation.

In June 1968, some three months after LBJ shook the political establishment by announcing his decision not to seek re-nomination, Chief Justice Earl Warren—fearing that Richard Nixon might win the White House—conveyed to the president his decision to retire. “Johnson saw the court as a means of perpetuating his social reform, particularly racial justice,” recalled domestic policy adviser Joe Califano, years after the fact. “He also wanted the Court to uphold the compromise he had reached with Catholics on funds for parochial schools, as well as his consumer, health, and environmental legislation.” The president expected that all of these issues would “play out in the courts long after he left the White House, and he intended to win them as well after he had gone.”

The plan called for elevating Fortas to chief justice and filling the vacant seat with Homer Thornberry, an appellate court judge, former Texas congressman and longtime Johnson ally. The president anticipated strong conservative opposition to Fortas on two counts: his liberalism, particularly on matters related to race, and his religion. Ignoring the advice of Clark Clifford, who warned that the conservative bloc would never confirm a liberal Jew to the chief justiceship, the president doubled down.

From the start, it all went wrong. Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former Klansman who filibustered the Civil Rights Act in 1964, pledged to do “everything in my power” to oppose the “leftist” Abe Fortas. Russell Long of Louisiana, another segregation stalwart, denounced the nominee as one of the “dirty five” who sought to expand the rights of the accused. James Eastland of Mississippi, an ardent racist and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told the president that he had “never seen so much feeling against a man as against Fortas.” He might have been thinking in part of his colleague, John McClellan of Arkansas, who ironically wanted that “SOB formally submitted to the Senate” so that he could take the fight public.

As a longtime intimate and former member in good standing of the Southern Democratic caucus, Johnson was firmly convinced that much of its opposition to Fortas stemmed from a toxic blend of anti-Semitism and racism. He urged the president of the American Bar Association to denounce the injection of religious bigotry into a court nomination battle and instructed White House staff to enlist prominent rabbis to lobby senators from states with large Jewish constituencies. With notable Republicans like Robert Griffin of Michigan also in the opposition camp, the White House activated key industrialists including Henry Ford IIand Paul Austin, the president of Coca Cola, to apply pressure where needed.

Matters came to a head when Fortas appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearings. Though a skilled litigator and no stranger to bare-knuckle politics, he was unprepared for the force of opposition with which his nomination met.

Committee members relentlessly attacked Fortas for his role in shaping key Court decisions that liberalized criminal rights and public obscenity laws—proxy issues in the broader political debate over race, poverty and counter-culture. In the face of such hostile charges, the nominee was left in a frustrating position; as a sitting member of the Court, he was compelled by tradition to demur on questions concerning past and pending court rulings.

Today’s Republicans consider as binding the so-called “Thurmond Rule”—a vague, non-statutory, largely undocumented position associated with exactly one former United States senator (Strom Thurmond), whom they claim opposed Fortas’ nomination on the grounds that LBJ was a lame-duck president. In fact, presidents don’t become lame ducks until their successors are chosen, and in 1968, Thurmond participated wholeheartedly in the nominee’s confirmation process. Like other conservatives, Thurmond opposed Fortas for a great many reasons that had nothing to do with the president’s right to nominate him and everything to do with resentment over the Warren Court’s liberal leaning and a rearguard defense of “states rights,” a term that was still freighted with ugly and unmistakable meaning in 1968.